When I started nursing, the holidays acquired a different kind of flavor. They're still joyful and special, but now they've got a layer of suicidal and despair on them.
It starts on Thanksgiving, which is usually calm enough during the day in the ER that we nurses can have a huge potluck. But at around 9pm, ambulances start rolling in with elderly, usually white, people who just can't take the lonely anymore and start having thoughts about putting their heads in the oven.
Christmas, well, Christmas in hospitals is linked with a diagnosis of "holiday heart." You eat too much, drink too much, put too much stress on your body from imbibing, and your heart starts to quiver from it all. We also get heart failure exacerbations and drunk driving accidents and suicidals in honor of the birth of Jesus. (On a side note, when women tell me there is no way they can be pregnant so there's no need to do a pregnancy test, I say, "Well, thanks to the Virgin Mary anyone under 55 has to get one." I'm your favorite nurse, right?)
Miraculously, New Years Eves have become a bit of a bore thanks to Uber, which should probably get federal funding on New Years Eve and July 4th for all the accidents it prevents. The past couple of years we have super staffed our trauma bay only to find it was overkill. Better safe than sorry, except for every other day when we're desperately understaffed.
Even as families are cuddling and enjoying their favorite foods, people are still dying on these holidays. I always knew that, but being on the fringe of that loss takes some of the sweetness away. Oh, and don't forget the 3% of PTSD I have from the shooting outside room 23 just before Christmas last year.
The Emergency Department is hallowed ground. But even with all the death and disaster that it hosts, it also hosts miraculous feats of humankind. People who are doctors and nurses step in to situations that are disgusting and foreign and uncharted and do it with confidence, kindness, and a smile on their face. We gown up, don gloves, and dive in... most often to shit. Literal shit. This holiday I cleaned a man whose diarrhea was so abundant he was basically bathing in shit, a woman who had been laying in shit for so long it had started eating the skin off the back of her body, and another guy who had shit caked under his fingernails who kindly exposed me to fungal meningitis.
To celebrate the season, my work had a hot cocoa and tamales celebration... we are multicultural even if we are religiously inappropriate sometimes. At the party (so glamorous it was in our break room), we had a photo booth. While looking at these pictures, it made me realize that I work with extraordinary people. Who else in my life would gown up, don gloves, and dive into the shit with me, even if it means they'll be exposed to something awful? The fact that people like this exist is kind of a miracle. That's something to celebrate.
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